How To Heal Our Cities

Sierra, May, 2000 by David Moberg

Myron Orfield has a radical solution to suburban sprawl--social justice.

If MYRON ORFIELD HAD EVER STEPPED INTO THE RING WITH MINNESOTA GOVERNOR JESSE "THE BODY" VENTURA, the former professional wrestler would have squashed him in a second. Orfield is a clean-cut, 39-year-old lawyer with modest-sized biceps and a soft-spoken manner. He is more comfortable with wonk talk about sewer pricing than bashing people over the head with metal chairs.

The two have tangled, but only in the intellectual arena, where the brainy Minnesota state representative has the advantage. A few years ago, Orfield proposed that a portion of the property tax on the most expensive homes in the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul area be pooled to aid the region's less affluent areas, and then-radio talk show host Ventura denounced Orfield on-air as a "communist"--possibly forgetting that in the early 1990s, as mayor of the blue-collar suburb of Brooklyn Park, he himself had approved of tax-base sharing. Now as governor, Ventura once again promotes the feisty legislator's once-lambasted ideas. "Everyone calls you a radical," Orfield reflects, "but by making bold proposals, you move the center. Every day I wish I had more radicals, but in Minnesota there are five hundred people who want to moderate a compromise for every one who raises the stakes. We need more people to raise the stakes."

Orfield is radical about urban sprawl. He started out working on a range of issues--enforcement of environmental laws, protecting wetlands, and reporting on toxic chemicals--but eventually came to see sprawl as "more powerful and overwhelming." Rather than approaching sprawl as an environmental issue only, however, Orfield sees it as one of social justice.

Among major U.S. metro areas, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are the second least dense and the eighth fastest growing. As the number of poor people and people of color increases in the urban core, most of the economic growth and new jobs are concentrated in the suburbs. Even with low tax rates the suburbs can still afford first-rate Schools and amenities.

Footing much of the bill for the flowering of the Twin Cities' affluent western and southern suburbs, however, have been residents in the older core, who have subsidized them with more than $825 million in metro highway construction and roughly $6 million a year in sewer taxes. State and federal transportation funds, which might have been used for central-city mass transit, were concentrated instead in outlying areas. In addition, these new 'burbs, with only one-quarter of the region's population, captured more than three-fifths of its new jobs. Deliberately exclusive by virtue of being zoned for large lots and houses, they offer little affordable housing and virtually no public transportation.

The older neighborhoods, meanwhile, are left with aging infrastructure and poverty. On the fringes of the downtown areas, as well as in older suburbs like Ventura's Brooklyn Park, immigrants from Mexico, Laos, and Somalia crowd into rundown housing along with African-Americans and American Indians. Needs increase in poor communities, but the property tax base stagnates and schools are shut down--even as they are being built at a frenetic rate on the outskirts.

These problems are not unique to Minnesota. Across the country, cities are relentlessly gobbling surrounding farmland, open space, and wetlands, leaving impoverished urban cores behind. America is a society that exalts the home as a spacious private kingdom, where everything from the auto-centric transportation system to the tax structure encourages cities to balloon outward. According to Federal Reserve Bank researcher Richard Voith, the mortgage tax deduction alone lowers the density of U.S. metropolitan areas at least 15 percent, increasing the size of lot that people are likely to buy and encouraging restrictive zoning that divides high- and low-income communities. Local governments favor large lots with expensive homes, because the owners provide ample property taxes for local budgets but require fewer public services than poor residents do.

So social inequality drives sprawl, and sprawl in turn makes inequality worse. Orfield has come to see sprawl as part of a massive interregional transfer of "social wealth" (taxes and educated citizens, for example) that benefits the most affluent communities, while "the people who are left behind have to pay."

Orfield discovered early on that the suburbs are not monolithic. The older, inner-ring suburbs share many problems with the central city: disappearing manufacturing jobs, eroding tax base, growing ranks of the poor. To illustrate which areas had common problems, he created color-coded maps. Deep red, for example, represented more than 10 percent poverty; those patches extended beyond the two core cities to nearby suburbs like Inver Grove Heights and Robbinsdale and, surprisingly, popped out among small fringe suburbs. Even newer suburbs for blue-collar or moderate-income white-collar workers suffered from the lack of big houses or shopping centers to tax. In another map showing the value of taxable property per household, the working-class suburbs north of Minneapolis were the same red and tan shades as the Twin Cities--signifying low taxable wealth per household--but the dark blue of the "favored quarter" southwest suburbs reflected nearly twice as much taxable property value per resident. Together with the central cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the losers in the metropolitan sprawl game made up at least two-thirds of the region--a potentially powerful political coalition.